Milena Radzikowska (Page 4)

Above is a redesign of an experimental prototype testing the transferability of a very specific technology across domains. Through this redesign activity, we hoped to illustrate how the redeployment of digital design can create affordances for the designer and user alike. The original prototype is an online system for playing back the text of a script [1] intended to support directors in blocking plays, actors in learning their lines, and students in studying plays [2]. This system, “Watching the Script,” provides an important educational mid-point between the static printed page and the staged or cinematic play. From this initial prototype, we repurposed the design for useRead More →

People experiencing a life-threatening illness go through a number of typical stages: diagnosis, treatment, and recovery. Collaborative online tools to support such people need to accommodate not only the particular conditions relevant to each stage; but also facilitate interactions between people at different stages. Since the context is a life-threatening illness, attention also needs to be paid to issues of privacy and confidentiality. In this paper we describe the preliminary design and testing through focus groups of a system intended to support women going through the stages of breast cancer. Our results show that a system of the kind we propose has the potential toRead More →

The goal of the NORA project is to produce software for discovering, visualizing, and exploring significant patterns across large collections of full-text humanities resources in existing digital libraries. The Clear Browser (shown above) provides a number of blank kernels that can be configured by the user through a data mining “training” process, then be applied to the larger collection. This sketch shows a total collection of 5000 author names, with a subset selected by the kernel. Team: University of Alberta University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign University of Maryland Mount Royal University CaSTA 2006: Breadth of Text – A Joint Computer Science and Humanities Computing Conference. UniversityRead More →

The goal of this article is to identify and describe one of the primary functions of aesthetic quality in the design of computer interfaces and visualization tools. We suggest that researchers in library and information science, computing science, and humanities computing can derive advantages in visual research by acknowledging – through their efforts to advance aesthetic quality – that a significant function of aesthetics in this context is to inspire the user’s confidence. This confidence typically serves to create a sense of trust in the interface or tool, and to increase its perceived usability. In turn, this increased trust may result in an increased willingness to engage with the interface, on the basisRead More →

In Fall 2008, the Faculty of Communication Studies at Mount Royal College, Calgary, launched a four-year Bachelor Degree in Information Design. As part of the first-semester core curriculum, we introduced a course titled Tools for Information Design. While a first-year undergraduate course of this kind might typically involve introductions to the standard suite of software used by designers, we have found that students in our other programs tend to have two weaknesses: a mind-set rooted in software dependency, and a focus on self-expression that is not appropriate for information designers. We therefore chose instead to focus on teaching low-fidelity sketching practices for designers (as opposedRead More →

I live and work

on the ancestral and traditional Indigenous territories of the Blackfoot and the people of the Treaty 7 region in Southern Alberta, which includes the Siksika, the Piikani, the Kainai, the Tsuu T’ina and the Stoney Nakoda First Nations. The City of Calgary is also home to the Metis Nation of Alberta, Region III.